Mobile hand-held computing devices such as personal digital assistants and messaging enabled communications devices are rapidly growing in popularity. More features are being incorporated into mobile hand-held computing devices. For example, there are now messaging enabled mobile phones that have display screens and built-in-cameras. Such phones allow pictures taken by the camera to be displayed on screen and stored on the phone and wirelessly transmitted as digital photos.
In order to incorporate digital photographs into e-mail, memos, word processing documents, tasks, contacts, or calendar entries, the user starts a dedicated camera application on the mobile device. The user then causes the camera to take a photograph and the resulting picture is stored as a digital file. The user then minimizes or closes the camera application and starts or returns to the relevant application program, such as an e-mail program, a scheduling program, or a word processing program, and attaches or inserts the digital file from its storage location in memory.
It will be appreciated that the prior art devices require a complex series of steps to achieve the desired result. In particular, the user must exit an active application, take a photograph, save the photograph, re-enter the application, locate the photograph within the database or file system, and then attach or insert the photograph into an active document in the application. The camera functions as a source of data only to a dedicated camera application, which saves the image data to memory in a database or file system.